"A great reading experience"

As children, sisters Grace and Melanie never felt close to their parents, who for whatever reason never blanketed the siblings with nurturing love. Now as an adult with her own child, Grace feels her marriage mirrors that of her parents though she showers love on her cherished daughter Kate. Suffering from a recurring nightmare of drowning, Grace believes she has no one to turn to for help especially her parents and her husband.

When her parents suddenly die in a tragedy, Grace inherits their Canterbury Island home in New York. Surprising everyone, Grace decides to spend New Year's at the house rather than her annual time with family members. There Grace looks into her family history guided by local fisherman Luke Keegan, who will help her with her past and perhaps attain a loving future if she heeds Melanie's advice.

THE PUZZLE BARK TREE is an engaging character study that ties the shrouded past with an unhappy present in a finding one's true self story line. The tale turns overly emotional at times, but the audience will devour all that angst as Grace seeks contentment learning a life lesson of "to thine own self be true". Fans of insightful contemporary fiction will want to join Grace on her journey to Nirvana that Stephanie Gertler portrays so eloquently.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted May 15, 2002

Summary

Grace Hammond Barnett grew up in the emotionally desolate company of the strangers who were her mother and father. Her only happy memories are of the times spent with her younger sister, Melanie, and Jemma, the warm-hearted family housekeeper who helped fill the void left by Grace's detached, inaccessible parents. Now a mother herself, Grace feels trapped in a sterile marriage to a prominent surgeon and haunted by the recurrent dreams of drowning. Her only anchor is her cherished daughter, Kate. In the aftermath of her parents' sudden double suicide-a tragedy that leaves Grace, Melanie, and Jemma reeling-Grace is bequeathed a house she never knew existed. Leaving her penthouse in Manhattan on New Year's Eve, she travels alone to Sabbath Landing, New York, to a log cabin house on Canterbury Island, surrounded by Diamond Lake. Here, Grace meets Luke Keegan, a local fishing guide whose family history is inextricably bound to hers...and to a devastating secret buried in the cloudy memory of childhood. With compassion and elegance, Stephanie Gertler crafts an emotionally rich story of what it means to survive and thrive against all odds. Like its intricate, interlocking pieces that branch out to shape lives, The Puzzle Bark Tree plumbs the mysteries of the people we can never truly know...of the incomplete memories we carry with us, and the love that can make us whole.